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Excerpt from the journal of the Wraith:

Writing these notes, bent over the desk to support my collapsing frame - I do not sleep well, I have terrible dreams - I feel a sense of power, of reverence, and perhaps it is that which compels me to keep this journal because I CANNOT BE IGNORED.

I have done so much and yet will I snuff out like a candle flame, my work remembered as mindless atrocity? This cannot be allowed. I must leave some small legacy of elucidation which will make clear that I could not have done it any other way.

The Adversary insists on underestimating me. This is a very tricky business, yet He fails as ever to appreciate my resourcefulness. Ever since childhood He has patronized and belittled me. But I am free and He is not. He allows society to wrap him up in the sticky, paralyzing web of thou shalls and thou shalt nots, whereas I define myself by one criterion alone: in contrast to Him. Can I make my intentions understandable to Him, though?

I have a certain flair with language, a smattering of education. I am a man of means, a man of substance, moderate nobility coursing through my veins, not a brute but an assassin of some distinction and erudition, and can only be appreciated in this way. If I can just set it all down correctly . . .

The landscape runs with blood, citizens quiver with terror behind boarded doors and windows, the police continue their search for what is described as a ghoul. An all-seeing eye watches my every move, lidless, awake, horrendous in aspect. And of my purpose, my objective, my true Adversary, nothing is known at all.


When the television and newspapers finally picked up on the story there was a quick scramble to baptize the serial killer with a clever sobriquet. Eventually "The Wraith" emerged victorious, mutually agreed upon in the same way a herd of deer agrees that the snap of a twig, the sound of a footfall, the hint of scent on the wind bespeak the presence of a predator, and all take flight at once. Wraith, because like some supernatural nemesis he struck without warning, worked unspeakable evil upon his victims, and left behind not a single trace of his motive or identity.

The Wraith has become his epitaph . . . but once, I knew him by a different name.


Excerpt from the journal of the Wraith:

I thought at the beginning I was reasonably controlled, and with careful attention the need would pass. But the need has not passed, in truth it has grown fiercer, I must admit this. I cannot sleep or think for it . . . will there ever be an end to my suffering? I do not know.

Though thou seest me not pass by,
Thou shalt feel me with thine eye
As a thing that, though unseen,
Must be near thee, and hath been;
And when in that secret dread
Thou hast turn'd around thy head,
Thou shalt marvel I am not
As thy shadow on the spot,
And the power which thou dost feel
Shall be what thou must conceal.

Last night I stalked and sniffed and scrounged and in the worst dregs of the city came upon a sleeping child. Odiferous little waif, scabby and malnourished and clothed in rags. No doubt its reprobate parents were somewhere lost in a haze of drugs. I think it is not cruelty that drove me then but an excess of feeling. I am a very sensitive person.

I advanced pityingly upon the child, slowly, slowly. Cradling it in my arms I was overcome with an ominous premonition that this act represented the crossing of a line that once traversed may never be retroceded. I attached my mouth to its neck, my teeth, very sharp, slicing through skin and flesh and meeting with a click and I could, oh god, I could have stopped then with the child shocked but basically uninjured, but I could not stop as the blood washed over my tongue and filled my throat and I let the limp form drop to the cold, filthy concrete and reached for that precious jewel, that mirror of the soul, and oh what must the child have seen then, my fingers stretching out, eclipsing vision and digging, gouging, plucking, and then darkness as I hold aloft that sightless dripping orb.

It grows late now and I feel the urge coming over me again.


I first became officially involved in the investigation when I received a call from One Police Plaza asking for my help in profiling the killer known as the Wraith. I'd given assistance to them on several other occasions, although I usually refrained from taking the stand as a forensic psychologist. Despite initial reservations, I felt my professional advice would steer them in the correct direction. Interpretation of the densely obtuse symbolism that murders are fraught with is a specialty of mine.

The case's documentation was delivered to my office that evening by a Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta, the NYPD's FBI liaison. We'd met before, but only in passing, on other cases. He was of a common enough type, beetle-browed, squat and hairy, but with a certain admirable low cunning and a sixth sense for the criminal which had clearly served him well in his chosen profession. I invited him in and motioned him toward a comfortably overstuffed chair, but he remained standing, squinting at the diplomas on my wall.

"May I offer you a drink?"

"Thanks, but technically I'm on duty." He avoided meeting my direct gaze in a conspicuous, if maladroit, effort at politeness. I have tried to never mask my deformity out of shame, but I couldn't help but be affected by how ill at ease it made some people.

With a sigh, I poured myself a splash of Laphroaig, neat. "Fortunately, my profession has no such strictures. At least, when I'm not with a client."

"Mind if I smoke, doc?" He waved a cigar the approximate size, shape, and aroma of a dog turd.

I minded very much, but I told him to do as he pleased. He was a fidgeter, this D'Agosta, and if I didn't allow him to indulge in his disgusting oral fixation I could all too easily picture him taking books from the shelf and replacing them out of order, or handling valuable trinkets and fragile curios that would slip through his stubby, grimy fingers. This way I would only have to air out my drapes and contend with moving the furniture to conceal ash burns on what was really only a second rate Ghashghaie carpet.

Sipping the scotch, I relaxed on my leather settee and began scanning the material the FBI profilers had already put together. The efforts of my colleagues was the typical hackwork I'd come to expect. I'd seen more profound use of insight used to solve a game of Clue.

The facts of the case were simple. A series of killings linked by modus operendi, stretching back over at least two decades and occurring all over the world. Only with advances in computer technology and forensic evidence techniques had they been tied together as representing the work of a single man. In the past year or so the killings had become more and more frequent, and almost all took place in New York state, the last two in the city alone this past month.

Included among the information were photographs taken at the scene of the crime. These were ghastly in the extreme. The Wraith preferred to leave his victims resting in meticulously detailed tableaux morte, and despite the wide variety of other mutilations the corpses displayed, in all cases the flesh of the face had been completely flensed away leaving a bare skull and a single staring eye. The other eye was missing.

I did find it intriguing that the Wraith had no communication with the police. It is typical for a serial killer to taunt and toy with authority, adding the spice of danger to what for them is an enjoyable acting-out of fantasies. Also, most serial killers are essentially narcissistic and feel they deserve recognition and fame. It is not, as most people assume, a subconscious desire to be caught. Imprisonment would end the game.

Whatever the Wraith was trying to say, he said it more subtly, perhaps for a smaller, more specific and discriminating audience.

"As I'm sure you're already aware," I said quietly, tapping my finger on the photo. "Most murders are crimes of passion. Not of love, but tremendous chemical and electrical surges from the primitive reptilian limbic system of the brain that temporarily overwhelm the cingulate, the seat of the will, and override the value judgments of the frontal lobes."

"That's a funny way of putting it," D'Agosta grunted. "Like finding a ticket on your windshield and punching the meter so hard you break your knuckles?"

"Precisely. It's fairly basic neurophysiology. Emotions easily prevail over logic because the pathways from the amygdala, the center of emotions, is far more developed and so carries more neural signal traffic and therefore more influence, than the less developed pathways that run in the other direction."

I placed the distressing pictures face down on my desk and stared out the window. It was the 28th of January and even for New York the weather was grim and bitterly cold. Only a few hunched figures scuttled past on the sidewalk below.

As often happened nowadays, I felt a distinct sense of being covertly observed. This was no irrational prickling of hairs on the back of the neck but a subconscious tally of impressions that something was just slightly off in my surroundings. Not enough to form a definite idea of what the threat might be, but enough to trigger anxiety. I narrowed my eyes at the people below, trying to discern a familiar gait, a recognizable gesture that would give the one I expected away.

I could perceive nothing. Either my intuition had steered me wrong, or I must accept I truly was imagining things.

The police officer cleared his throat and exhaled a perfectly formed smoke ring. Giving myself a little shake, I smiled and returned to the subject at hand.

"Now in a serial murderer like our Wraith the equation becomes orders of magnitude more complex. We can put aside the idea that he led a deprived or impoverished childhood, or that he is mentally subnormal. The very sophistication required to carry out such violent crimes and leave absolutely no evidence to be detected by your capable forensic teams proves he is no mere bloodthirsty beast."

"You saw those pictures," he said obstreperously. "You telling me that's not bloodthirsty?"

"The Wraith has invested his sadistic acts with symbolic meaning. His thinking has acquired a delusional quality marked by rigidity and incoherence. He suffers an extreme emotional tension that cannot be vented in any normal way so instead culminates in violent crisis."

D'Agosta's brow furrowed deeply as he processed this. "So something keeps all this anger bottled up inside him, building up until he blows?"

"You do have a knack for putting the situation simply." I smiled again to soften the insult. No matter. He did not recognize it. "But it is not necessarily anger that drives him. Any negative emotion might be at the core of his psychosis. Fear, guilt, shame. The imagery of the missing eye strikes me as paramount. I believe the Wraith wants to tell us something important."

"That he's batshit bonkers? Hate to break it to him, but we guessed already."

I grimaced at his attempt at humor and tossed off the last of my scotch. "In truth, I do not think he himself knows what message he is striving to impart. His memory has hidden it even from himself, to spare his conscious mind, his ego."

"Everyone tells me you're the best in the biz." D'Agosta snorted, blowing malodorous blue smoke out of both nostrils. "But if you ask me, this fancy psychological horseshit is just a way for lawyers to talk their clients out of the punishment they deserve. Kill a guy? Blame on mommy spanking you, or the priest who felt you up, or gobbling up too many Twinkies."

I picked imaginary flecks from my jacket while I regained my temper. "Everything a person does has an underlying motive. There's a subtext of communication that says more than mere words ever could. True intentions show clearly in behavior. I've simply trained myself to read between the lines, to see the symbolic communication of this deeper mind and its obsessions."

"And they wonder why you never want to take the stand." He began to pace restively, leaving a trail of fine ash. "Can you explain all that so it'll play in Peoria, doc?"

"My technique is rather esoteric, Lieutenant, but not that difficult to comprehend. It's a way of seeing beyond the obvious. Despite what many believe, it is the subconscious and not the conscious mind that contains our actual level of intelligence. It is always working, picking up subtle cues in the environment, the underlying reality of the world, and it gives the conscious mind continual support and guidance. However, it is blinded and constrained every moment by the straightjacket of everyday fears, cultural biases and learned behaviors. The conscious mind is defined by its limitations, but the subconscious is vast and also truthful. It won't let us get away with much. "

"So what are you saying, the Wraith is some kind of split personality with an evil side that's making him kill?"

"Nothing so airport-paperback cliché, Lt. D'Agosta. Rather, a repressed memory has destabilized this man. Something he has tried to bury but which has taken on a life of its own and seeks to devour him. Some internal rage compels him to repeat some past act of violence that made a profound impact on his developing psyche."

"Isn't there something a little more concrete you can give me?" D'Agosta pressed. "I mean, this is all really interesting but we're talking about a nutcase running around slaughtering innocent people and ripping their eyes out. That's not theoretical at all."

Frostily, I said, "Very well then. A few thoughts on your 'Wraith' fellow. This man would be considered quiet and conservative by those who know him. Modest. People would think him kind because of his quiet demeanor, but truthfully that only masks an extreme sociopathy."

Still crossing and recrossing the room with a heavy tread, D'Agosta was taking it all in. Perhaps he was cleverer than he first appeared.

"His job status is questionable, but I feel any work he does is secondary to him, as is money, if he is indeed still employed. He does not drink to excess or abuse drugs. He would chose a home far from the crowds, if possible, isolated as he feels himself isolated from the world, but not completely apart. He enjoys walking around the neighborhood, people-watching and selecting his victims. Likely there are more corpses than you have found. His most satisfying killings would be performed at this sanctum sanctorum, where he feels safe."

"Can you guess age, race, anything like that?"

"Caucasian male. That's practically become formula, but in this case it's true. He is very immature, but not youthful. In his mid forties, possibly a bit younger. All of the victims have been under the age of twenty, suggesting he is more at ease with people of his emotional developmental level. There has been absolutely no indication of sexual assault on the victims, am I correct?"

The policeman nodded. "The only consistent mutilation was to the face and neck."

"That leads credence to it," I said. "It means his motives are distinct from the vast majority of repeat killers, and unlike sociopaths who kill to further their own interest, he has nothing to reasonably gain from what he has done. His compulsion is something different entirely. He is highly intelligent and imaginative, but he is not satisfied with fantasies. He is a sad person, miserable for himself and his crimes. Emotional, vulnerable, easily upset. Completely self-absorbed. And yet at the same time he is very patient and calculating in his attacks, almost instinctual in his cunning. There are no voices or demons. This man knows exactly what he is doing. This makes him a paradox even to himself, which disturbs him."

I looked at him squarely.

"Whatever else is going on in his mind, whatever other urges, hopes or desires he feels, the Wraith's compulsion to kill would always be number one."

D'Agosta ceased pacing and stood there in the middle of my Persian carpet, a statue of constabular contrariness. He still would not look me in the face. In fact, he couldn't seem to tear his attention away from the painting behind my desk.

"/Mit der Zufalligen Familie./ The artist is Richard Oelze," I said, stepping into his territorial bubble in an effort to nudge him towards the door. "A gift from a grateful and well-off client. Of course, it's all a grey blur to me, but I appreciated the thought."

Struck by a sudden insight, I snatched up the pictures of the latest victim again. My gaze traveled up from the sad, splayed corpse to the graffiti on the wall above. It is easy to speak of blood running cold, ice forming in the guts, and so on, but the sensation as blood suddenly rushes away from the inner organs to the muscles and lungs in preparation for escape is in truth indescribably horrible.

Taking care to control the shaking of my hands, I asked, "What do you see here? I mean, what does this graffiti look like to you?"

"Looks like a Rorschach test. Just a bunch of blobs." D'Agosta studied the picture. "Kind of weird colors though. All pink and light green. Is that important?"

"No . . . not at all. There is very little other help I can offer, I'm afraid, without more solid evidence to build upon. I will keep the material overnight and have psychological profile written up for you in the morning. That is all I can do."


Excerpt from the journal of the Wraith:

Curiously spiritless today. Able to accomplish nothing. No thoughts of blood, no thoughts of any kind. A sensation of sea change, of drifting through subaqueous depths, an unformed creature migrating to a distant shoal to . . . what? What goal drives me onward?

That business last night. The boy, another young boy, coming to consciousness. Looking about himself. Eyes wide, straining to see into the darkness, to see myself watching him and waiting. Terrified now. Trying to move and panicking when he discovers he is bound. Not thirty minutes ago wandering free as an idiot and now trussed like a turkey. I show him my knife.

"Listen to me," I say. "Now listen to me," and bounce the light from the blade into his eyes so that he gasps. "This is me, do you understand? It's me! Don't turn away!"

Kyrie eleison he says, but that means nothing to me.

"God cannot hear you, nor will he save you - "

"Help me, please help me!"

"No! No help!"

He will not listen. None of them ever listen. That is the true horror of it: even at this moment, when all is done, NONE OF THEM ARE LISTENING.

"I'm going to kill you," I say, opening up a gash along his cheek, "But first I want you to know why."

"Help me," he says again, mindlessly. His head sags to the side, his tongue protruding like a corpse's, but I know he can hear me. One must go on.

"Hear me. Hear why I am doing this, one of you must listen." I take a deep breath and let the words tumble out as I work. "I wanted to know love. I want to burn the message deep in the heart that we must truly know each other and whether that connection is forged by pain or lust or fury it must be known, we must break through to a level of feeling we have never known before because it is this and only this which separates us from the beasts and without it, well, then surely we shall all die."

His eyes roll. He struggles so hard against his bonds that the rope draws blood. Breath squawks in his throat.

"And death," I continue, "Death is nothing compared to the pain of ignorance."

And saying this, saying no more, I bring the knife down and through him. His body breaking and opening under mine, his blood leaping toward me, I'm choking, drowning in it, an aggressive dying and his whimpers not pitiful but palliative. His eyes are the blue of a morning glory, and fade quickly when plucked. Realized then, am still realizing, that taking their lives is not the answer. Was never the answer.

I've seen a dying eye
Run round and round a room
In search of something, as it seemed,
Then cloudier become;
And then, obscure with fog,
And then be soldered down,
Without disclosing what it be,
'T were blessed to have seen.

This house smells of rot. And now I will have to find somewhere to dispose of him.


It was, as I told D'Agosta, a kind of fixation. We were children, playing in the subterranean tunnels below the family home, which had begun its existence as a monastery. The catacombs had been converted to a mausoleum and the remnants of several ancestor's decidedly eccentric collections resided down there. Among them the rusted, rotting, yet still functional apparatus of a magic lantern show designed by a lunatic with a raging hatred for all humanity. This was what we discovered that day as we explored together.

Like any two little boys, we dared each other to go in first. I had not until that day realized the extent of his antipathy towards me. He mortified me into entering that machine first, playing expertly on my desire to be admired by him. When the show began, the door locked, the grotesque phantasmagoria danced and I cowered and cried in helpless terror, I heard him outside laughing.

I will give him the benefit of this much doubt - perhaps he honestly did only intend to throw a fright into me. One of those endless dominance games boys play, a desire hardwired into our genes for a high rung on the hierarchal social ladder. I suppose he didn't know about the pistol concealed in the chamber to provide a victim driven mad by fear the ultimate out.

I was made of sturdier stuff than the ordinary run of victim, however, even at that age. I'd never been scared by spook stories, and I found the normal things that frighten and repel people - blood and gore and rot - to be merely interesting. Father had been a hunting enthusiast in the days before this was seen as ecologically incorrect, and he'd taught me how to handle a gun.

The weapon was ancient, a Webley single-shot target pistol dating to at least the 1880s. Heavy in my little hands, the grip warped and slick with mold. As calmly as possible, I aimed at what I calculated was the heart of the machine and fired.

The humid air had corroded the brass cartridges. The barrel exploded. White-hot shrapnel tore into my flesh, fragments of metal digging deep into my face, smashing through bone and lodging deep in my brain. I will never know for certain, but I reassure myself that at that moment the laughter must surely have stopped.

I should count myself lucky. Children have healing abilities far superior to adults, and I was so young that still-developing brain recovered motor abilities and speech almost as good as if I had never lost them.

Not that I have been entirely free of lasting effects. I suffer migraines so severe that I often black out during the worst of them. My entire right side is weak. One eye is more or less useless, and to compound the insult, damage in my lingual and fusiform gyri, near the ventro-medial occipital lobe, caused cerebral achromatopsia. I became almost totally colorblind.

My new world wasn't entirely black and white, however. I see mostly in watered-down shades of blue-gray and gray-brown. If I get very close to an object, so close it almost entirely fills my field of vision, I can get an idea of its color although this effect is so subtle it's almost subliminal, a guess rather than a conscious perception. Only red remains the proper color, and only the most brilliant and pure shades of crimson do not decay into grungy orange.

And the Wraith knew this.

Knew this and encoded a message in that graffiti. To a person with normal vision the splotches of color would seem random. A dichromatically colorblind person might see a hint of pattern. Only I, who must distinguish shades by luminosity contrast instead of hue, would see what he had to say to me: 891 RVRSD DRV

I was the one he had fixated on, the one he blamed as the true source of his torment, his chosen nemesis even though I was innocent of any crime except being born. The murders he'd committed were recreations of this childhood crime, but with the act completed: he killed me.

As the years passed these actings-out of his ritualistic fantasy would have become less and less satisfying, because the victims were only poor substitutes for myself. He would only be satisfied when he removed the real thorn in his flesh.


Excerpt from the journal of the Wraith:

I sit hunched over these notes which have attempted to explain so much and yet explain so little and know that it would be wise council to desist until the investigation has collapsed into false evidence or futility or until some hapless thug is brought in and charged with my crimes. I knew I should stop! Lay low! But I cannot and before the sun sets I had gone hunting once again.

Yes, a young man this time, tall and thin and sharp-featured and looking very much like the Adversary as I remember Him. Of course, He would be much older now, and this young man's hair is far too dark, but a bottle of dye takes care of such little details.

I take my time, enjoying watching him lay sleeping here amongst the age, senescence, rot, dust, death, so fresh and pure, so young and virginal. In my mind, at least, all of them are virgin, untouched. No one knows better than I their true corruption, the unspeakable pleasures which even the most innocent have indulged themselves, shrieking. But in the cool gray caverns of the mind, all is purity.

It is time now to test my remarkable mechanism, which far exceeds even my ancestor's magic lantern show in its ability to warp and devastate the psyche. The chassis is that of an multispatial disorientation device, or "Gyrotron", a human centrifuge wherein a cockpit is gimbaled on three independently-controlled revolving axis, i.e., pitch, roll and yaw. But I shall not go into the details here. Suffice it to say that my subject is blindfolded, with plugs in the nose and ears, and then set spinning wildly until he cannot tell which way is up. The mind is isolated from all external sensory input with which it might check itself against reality and must instead pay heed to its own inner machinations.

I predict that I can induce complete and utter madness in a formerly sane person with only a few such treatments. Perhaps then, mind unchained, he will be able to understand and thus free me from this wretched and timeless burden under which I suffer.


The chill, fleeting winter day had almost burned itself out by the time I found the Beaux Arts mansion on Riverside Drive. That time of day we'd always called l'heure bleue, when the rest of the night's revelries were to be eagerly planned over apéritifs.

I hadn't visited here since I oversaw the auction of some lesser curiosities. It had come as quite a shock to discover the property had been bequeathed to me in my great-granduncle Leng's will, partly because I never thought I'd be traced through a family member. I had not lived under my own name for years.

It is not a deceit I am proud of, but circumstances forced it on me after the one now called the Wraith used his diabolical skill in manipulating the minds of others to whip a bunch of drunkards into a superstitious frenzy so that they burned down my family's home. My parents perished in the blaze. I knew I was next on his list. I had been the focus of his rage and suspicion for years, paradoxically because I was the one human being who was closer to him than any other. To save my life, I became another person, but it appears I did not disappear as completely as I wished.

As a wraith, I could not hold a candle to him.

There were legal wranglings in getting possession of the property, of course. A young woman had taken up residence, having convinced Leng she was the product of one of his early, fruitless life-extending treatments. The old man's failing mind (not to mention deteriorating eyesight) was sufficiently confuddled and he accepted her preposterous story. She was of course a con artist and a gold digger, and I had her summarily rousted when I took possession.

Now I stood before the Riverside house feeling oddly like a man summoned to his own execution. The mansion was three stories of turreted, gargoyled monstrosity, brooding over the deserted street and the weed-choked remnants of a rock garden. The once grand exterior had been defaced by graffiti and a half century of neglect, but behind the boarded up windows the interior still retained a shadowy vestige of its lost grandeur.

My key still worked, which didn't surprise me, and I let myself in. Nothing but dust motes stirred at my passage. I played the beam of my flashlight over the tarp covered furniture, searching the ground floor thoroughly. The clammy smell of wet paper and moldering leather, of standing water and sawdust, of rodent urine and crumbling plaster was overpowering. Despite the decay, the original fineness of the house was still apparent. Leng had decorated it to closely resemble the ancestral home in New Orleans, and no doubt that was why the Wraith had chosen to go to ground here.

There was no sign of occupation except in the kitchen, where I discovered a hot plate, what was clearly a piss bucket, a soiled bedroll, empty soda bottles, crumpled candy wrappers and a few scattered cans that disgorged a squirming knot of plump cockroaches when I accidentally kicked one over. The squalor peculiarly depressed me. Even after his first breakdown he'd retained the personal neatness of a cat. To live in such filth was a unambiguous indication of how far he'd sunk.

I paused at the grand staircase, resting my hand lightly on the ornate carved banister. No, the Wraith would not have bothered ascending the stairs. He would naturally gravitate to the cold, lightless depths of the cellar to stage his ultimate re-enactment.

I made way with no little trepidation down the creaking stairs. The feeble beam of my flashlight barely penetrated the deepening gloom. With great reluctance, I turned it off. There was no point alerting him to my presence.

Leng had dug the cellars out far below the house's original architect had planned. The temperature dropped noticeably as I descended, and when I put a steadying hand on the rough brick of the wall I could feel the dampness of foul river water seeping in. All was silence, except for the crepitant stairs and my own labored respiration. The air was so heavy with murk and moisture I felt compelled to walk with my arms outstretched as if to push a way through.

Terror sizzled under my skin, making the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. I am not afraid to admit this. The lack of light was part of it. I've long dreaded losing what was left of the pitiful remnants of my vision, and in this complete and abject darkness I felt as if I were becoming insubstantial, the outlines of my form blurring and merging with the shadow, and that I might very soon drift away into nothingness, less than a ghost.

When I finally was able to make out a dull yellowish line of light showing under a door at the bottom of the stairs, I felt my spirits lift despite knowing what it boded. The door swung open at the slightest touch, admitting me into the lowest level of the Riverside mansion's cellar.

Multiple light sources flickered in odd crevices and nooks with the dim lucidity of candle flame. The walls were stone, the floor hard packed clay. Squared-off posts supported the low ceiling, into which a hinged trapdoor had been cut and from which a broken stair ladder hung at an angle. A coal bin nestled next to an old furnace. Rusty junk was piled high in the dark corners and everything was shrouded by a layer of cobwebs, grime and dust. A mixture of odors, of fetid water, coal dust and spoiled potatoes, made it difficult to draw breath. Under it all was the distinctive tang of dried and fresh blood.

Amidst the mold and ruin a device stood in the center of the open space at the center of the room, a huge, gleaming contraption of circular steel pipes and precisely machined joints. It was so overwhelmingly bizarre and out of place that for a long moment I did not recognize that a pitiful human shape was strapped into the center of the thing.

I hurried over, fearing the worst, but at my touch the young man gasped and stirred weakly. Injured, but still alive. The indistinct light made it hard to see. My numb fingers fumbled at the catches of the straps and I forced myself to slow down and perform every step carefully. The boy had been blindfolded, gagged, and his ears and nostrils blocked with foam plugs. It must have been a near total sensory deprivation.

Freeing the last strap, I removed him from the machine and eased him to the floor. He seemed to be in relatively decent condition, although his breath gurgled in and out. Likely he had choked on his own vomit and was in the first stage of aspiration pneumonia. The Wraith had been at work on him already, and with more violence than he had shown with his previous victims. I diagnosed LeFort type III fractures of the face, and over one eye the blindfold was crusted with dark, sticky fluid, and clung to the skin. The boy moaned when I gently pulled it away.

In coldly straightforward medical terminology he exhibited traumatic luxation of the globe with avulsion of the optic nerve and all extraocular muscles except for the medial rectus. To put it plainly, his eye had been yanked from the socket and left to dangle from the optic nerve like ripe fruit on the vine. His eyelids had been slit at the corners and peeled back, the flaps of skin literally stapled to his cheek and forehead to leave the mutilation staring and exposed.

I noticed a few other things. Bite marks in the soft skin of his face and neck, where the victim's faces had always been carved away to remove incriminating evidence. Each wound was a perforated crescent of scabs surrounded by dark purple bruises, the distinctive mark of human jaws. Not cannibalism, though, not quite. The placement of the wounds was eerily like where ordinary people would place kisses.

The young man's hair had also been dyed a garish, unconvincing shade of orange, and smudges of dye still discolored his skin. He hadn't been here more than a day or two, thank god. If I could get him out of here, he had a chance of recovering his vision.

I stood and began to cast around for something, anything, to help stabilize his condition while I called 911, and suddenly saw the source of the lights. Candles, yes, but each was placed in an arrangement to illuminate not the room but a collection of gorgeous hand-blown glass jars. In each jar a single human eye floated in clear preservative fluid. Bobbing gently. Staring. Watching.

"/Ave, frater/," a soft voice said from behind me.

I turned from the votive eyes and saw him.

His lean vulpine face hovered ghostlike in the gloom. It was the face that haunted my dreams ever since childhood, the last thing I saw before my vision was destroyed. My eyesight, my psyche, my life. Destroyed.

"How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?"

I recognized the quotation from Marlowe's Faust at once and responded almost without thinking, "Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it."

There was something in his hand, long and gleaming silver in the guttering light. Even now, his reflexes were far superior to mine. His arm flashed up, he lunged forward, something slammed into my skull, and except for a transitory sensation of awful pain I knew no more.


Excerpt from the journal of the Wraith:

Part of me, part of me - I admit this - desires discovery because it will allow me to make my explanations to the world, but another more sober, sapient part desires to live another day for there is much work left to do. I know now that what I have done comes not from cruel or cold impulse but love, LOVE! of all humanity, a desire for connection, for blending, for fusion of forces, but I fear this would be gravely misunderstood.

By thy cold breast and serpent smile,
By thy unfathom'd gulfs of guile,
By that most seeming virtuous eye,
By thy shut soul's hypocrisy;
By the perfection of thine art
Which pass'd for human thine own heart;
By thy delight in others' pain,
And by thy brotherhood of Cain,
I call upon thee! and compel
Thyself to be thy proper Hell!

If He can capture me I will gladly tell Him all, but I cannot commit myself willingly into His hands.

And now the need is strong within me, a seed of desire sending tendrils of passion throughout my guts, a driving, ceaseless compulsion. I can barely hold this pen any longer and I must go down into the darkness and show them all, show my Adversary, that I am no monster but working for the purposes of love.


It is axiomatic among scholars of the wickedest mutations of the human mind that serial killers do not want to be caught, not really. But the Wraith had desired capture for almost thirty years. He simply had to make sure I would be the one who snared him.

When I regained consciousness, I found myself bound hand and foot and knew in those first moments of awakening that he had trapped me in his machine.

"Blood is weak liquid. There must be something, something darker and stronger," he was muttering rapidly, under his breath.

I opened my eyes and gazed into his, pale and crazed as cracked glass. He - the Wraith, I cannot make myself call him by his true name - stood close to me, our faces so close the tip of his nose practically touched mine. He stared at me deeply, searchingly, and yet I had the feeling he saw me as a code or riddle and not a fellow human being.

He was in terrible shape, emaciated as a famine victim, unshaven, filthy. His head and hands shook slightly. A bloody sore crusted over the corner of his mouth. Only his eyes appeared as I recalled them, peering from his greasy tangled mats of hair with a jeweler's clarity, the blue shifting to near white in my colorless vision, although even a normally-sighted person would only be able to see a hint of the remembered shade.

In his trembling hands he gripped a flensing knife of the type used by Inuit hunters to remove muscle and fat close to the bone from seals. A long, narrow, slightly up-curved blade and a walrus tusk ivory handle. What's more, I recognized that particular knife as having belong to my great-grandfather, a big game hunter of some renown. It was carved in the shape of a roaring lion's head - this was the knob that had hit my head - eagle's wings stretched along the handle, with an all-seeing eye at the hilt. A perversion of the family crest. Dark dried blood had flowed into the channels, casting the carving it into stark relief. How it had come into the Wraith's possession, I had no idea. I had thought it destroyed in the conflagration that had taken my parents, but he had either spirited it away beforehand or clandestinely dug through the rubble and ashes afterward, seeking it.

I moved my head slightly, breaking the hypnotic pull of his gaze. The previous victim lay awkwardly on the floor, like a rag doll tossed away by an unloving child. He still breathed, but I could not tell how close to death he might be.

"Let that boy go, he did nothing to you." I swallowed. "Have pity."

"Pity? /Consummatum est/," he replied. It is used up.

The Wraith followed my sightline to him, then looked away, pitiless and indifferent as a god, and said almost to himself, "People always laughed at me. Misjudged me. You know that. Always. No one listens. No one understands. Will they think me a monster?"

"I'll listen to you. Please explain to me," I urged gently. Recalling how mother would speak lovingly to us in French, I pleaded, "Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner."

"You'll listen!" His mouth stretched wide as he screamed, and the scabbed-over sore broke open. Watery blood flowed down his chin. "You'll see, you'll understand in the end, oh yes! Remorse and recrimination have me in their grasp, but what can I do?"

"I did nothing to you," I said. "I looked up to you. I adored you."

"Your list of crimes against me is as long as it is heinous, my beloved Adversary." I could almost see the crackling rage flicker like St. Elmo's fire across the clenched muscles of his jaws and neck. "Firstly, you killed my mouse!"

I strained to remember. Ah yes, that little rodent he carried around when he was eight or nine years old. Horrible thing, it shit everywhere and chewed up his shirt collars. "The cat killed it, not I. And might I remind you, the animal was mine in the first place. It was part of a science project and when you stole it you ruined an entire six month's work."

He leaned in close again. "For secondly, I found your notebooks. Blood and veins and tendons and bone! Your sick fantasies. I had to stop you, I, the only one who recognized your evil, I had to stop you before you killed again. You must see me and understand what I have done, and what has been lacking. Eye for an eye. I must go on, I must plant this seed which will flower and cover the earth. I must bind you and bring you to awareness."

As if he'd reminded himself of his task, he checked the straps at my wrists and ankles, then tied a strip of coarse black cloth over my eyes. That was the worst of it, the sudden and total absence of vision. I would almost rather him to have stabbed me in the gut than to blindfold me. Of course, he was well aware of that. He'd always had the perverse skill at discerning a person's big shiny red buttons and knowing just when to push them.

Hearing the creak of dread in my voice, I explained, "Those were my notebooks for medical college. Anatomical dissection. Animal and human cadavers. We tried to explain it to you. This psychic cud you keep vomiting up and re-chewing is doing you no good."

"Forgive and forget?" His voice was suddenly honey-smooth, faintly mocking. "I adhere to another code. Like the Japanese Bushido, Code Duello, or the old Anglo Honour. If a mad dog bit your hand, my Adversary, would you not chop the bitten finger off lest your whole body should madden with the poison?"

He'd retreated into poetry as he'd done so often back when I knew him before, the sad word salad of an intelligent schizophrenic. There was no point arguing. The delusions of his paranoia were airtight, the product of a damaged brain and therefore immune to reason and logic. I could have adopted a starving baby from a third world country and he would have convinced himself I was fattening up the child to devour it.

And yet I could not help feeling sorry for him, ghoul that he was. He was no more responsible for his actions than the rabid dog he'd alluded to.

If only mother and father had taken his sickness seriously and not tried to cover it up to keep the family name from being tarnished by the stigma of mental illness. If only they'd gotten him help sooner, listened to his doctors and kept him on his medication. It was a form of child abuse, and both of us suffered - he from his disease, me from his suspicion, his accusations, his irrational cruelty.

I suppose he'd had an effect on my life's trajectory, as well. Without him to observe at such close range during my childhood him I might never have become so interested in the bizarre workings of the human mind. I have never pondered what I could have become instead.

Projected onto the echoing darkness he'd plunged me into, I could play that scene over and over in a private mental cinema. It had taken me a long time to recover from my shrapnel wounds, months isolated at home, relearning with excruciating slowness how to once again feed myself, clean myself, dress myself, to speak and move properly. He had avoided me as best he could, only visiting when mother or father quite literally dragged him into the sickroom.

"Don't you think what happened hurt me, too?" I demanded. I could hear him shuffling about, picking up objects, and I did not eagerly anticipate what must be coming next. "Do you have any idea how debilitating it was? Do you even remember?"

The noises stopped. He roughly yanked the blindfold up and for a moment I was so grateful to see again that I couldn't speak.

"I confronted you," I said finally. "You were sprawled on that lion skin rug of great-grandfather's, that white Timbavati lion you loved so much. You'd pried one of its glass eyes out and you were playing with it, rolling it back and forth across the slate floor."

He tilted his head sideways, listening intently.

"I still had to use the cane, remember? You laughed at me because the tip kept skidding. And I asked you why you made me go in the magic lantern show first."

The tip of his tongue flickered out like a snake's, and he blinked slowly.

"What magic lantern show, you asked. I didn't know if you'd gone insane, or if you were tormenting me!" My heartbeat accelerated as a pustulent mental abscess broke open, festering decades of repressed vitriol flooded out. Sweat broke out on my skin, trickled down my face, and I heaved against my bonds so hard that my hands went numb. I'd lost my grip, my professional demeanor stripped away. "But you'd forgotten! You had actually forgotten that you tried to kill me!"

"To love, to have been so loved, or so duped by the appearance of love and to be so abandoned." His hands tightened into fists like balls of wire and he clutched them to his temples. "It's all mixed up inside," he moaned. "Unquiet, fearful sleep. Unhappy, fearful dreams. My brain plays tricks on me! You haven't experienced betrayal until your own brain turns on you. But there is marrow yet in these bones, they do not break easily."

"There's a way to unshackle you," I began, but he cut me off.

"Yes, yes, yes! What we have here, my dear, is a Gordian knot, and the way to deal with such a knot is always the same, isn't it?" He waved the flensing knife back and forth so candlelight licked along the blade. Clots of dried gore stained the gleaming length of metal, but the edge had been carefully sharpened.

A clamp of fear unlocked in my chest, shudders escaping like the release of doves on some ceremonial occasion. "What do you want from me?"

"For you, my Adversary, to listen to me. To understand, so that I am not born to blush unseen and waste my sweetness on the desert air."

Retreating into poetry again. "I know what you did - "

"I did this," he rasped. "I did, myself, I did this for love, for necessity, for the connection. I did it because I want half the light of your world. I want to take your flesh unto me in the most ancient and sacramental of all the rituals, I want to possess you utterly and make you whole. For love, for love, that was all I wanted!"

"I forgive you," I said.

But he had moved past the point where he could hear and comprehend. Tugging the blindfold back down over my eyes, he snarled. "Not to talk about what happens in cellars, never to mention it, that is a closed incident, that is finished. I will not think of it, not ever again."

And with that, he shoved something in my mouth, a hard piece of rubber, wrapping more cloth around my head to hold my jaws closed.

"I must go on, I must do what is essential as do we all." He whispered, quietly enough that only I could hear. "Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed in one self place, for where we are is hell, and where hell is there must we ever be . . . " and then switched on his infernal device.


Excerpt from the journal of the Wraith:

Mene mene tekel upharsin. The Adversary looked upon me and found me wanting.


As soon as the machine began to spin, I completely lost my orientation in space. I had never felt so alone, so helpless. A malignancy pressed on me, growing stronger as my gorge rose and every muscle in my body clenched agonizingly, straining to brace myself against the spinning void as I tumbled into a panicky delirium.

The dark depths of my dream were filled with lights and shapes twisting and spinning. Triangles pinwheeled past, crystal lattices tumbled, broke apart and reformed, symmetrical trees grew like forks of lightning. A whirling haze of fireflies danced in mad chaos all around them, weaving in and out in shifting patterns.

My sense of physical awareness faded, and I drifted limp among this fantastical landscape, unable to bat away the light-specks as they swarmed nearer. I struggled to order my thoughts, to tell myself these were merely phosphenes, specks of light produced by the electrical activity in the retina and visual cortex and usually only seen at the borderline of perception.

It was no use. I couldn't move, couldn't scream, could only wait in silent anguish as my fear, my loneliness, my desperation overwhelmed me. This was the magic lantern show all over again, stripped of its quaint graveyard spooks and refined to an unprecedented intensity, a genius of pure evil.

My fault. I could not help but think it - my fault. If only I had not given in to him, had not tried to prove my childish bravery by letting him persuade me to go into the machine first, had not tried to shoot the mechanism to disable it, had turned the gun on myself instead and ended it all cleanly.

A towering, swirling ethereal mass like a sandstorm of radiance and smoke rolled forward with brobdingnagian power, blowing the skittering sparks ahead of it like fallen leaves on a freshening wind. The points of light pulled closer to me, alighting briefly on me flesh with the burning-cold sensation of dry ice then swirling up and away, just to loop around and coming right back.

I watched in helpless horror as they began to form into a great spiral, a vast whirlpool with lightning crackling in its throat, opening into a endless infinity. The brilliance flared and dimmed rhythmically. The specks clinging to me began to pulse in unison. My resolve dwindled under the onslaught. The spellbinding whirlpool's gravity drew me tumbling toward it.

This surely sounds insane, and in fact I was hanging onto sanity by the skin of my teeth, but there is no way to express in words what I felt as I was swallowed whole. I could not tell how long I drifted there in that silent black featureless hell before I made out an impression of gray luminosity, obscuring drifts of mist, then a scintillating brightness that gradually increased until I could see again, I could see, I could see, I could see him standing over me . . .


Excerpt from the journal of the Wraith:

I am not a cruel man, I derive no prurient satisfaction from what I have done. I am seized and crippled by REGRET and SHAME at almost every moment . . . and yet, and yet what is the point? I confront the Adversary and know that it could have happened no other way.

I wept as I pulled Him from the machine and pressed my mouth to His unseeing eye. Forced my tongue in between soft yielding globe and hard bony rim. Thrust my tongue in, slid into the tight pink wetness, curled and wriggled it around. Cupped, teased, sucked. Pried it out, took it ripe and round and warm into my mouth, and snapped the optic nerve between my very sharp teeth. Blood filled the empty socket like an offering cup and worshipful, kneeling, I lowered my head and lapped it clean.

I drank of Him until the body blended with the white of the sheet, until His dying struggles locked His body against mine. I wept. Remorse and recrimination have me in their clutches. But what else could I do? Consider the situation, my Adversary, and I am certain You will do so with Your usual ponderous gravity, assessing and understanding all . . . what could I do?

There are no words left, only the impulse to flee the room, escape the damn house, run through the streets like a madman and shout my love to the world -


He sat hunched up awkwardly in a far corner, knees and elbows drawn up, giving him the look of a spider's dried out husk. I gently prised the journal from his unresisting hands. There was more than sufficient evidence to convict him without it, and I felt it was intended for me alone.

I understood now.

He had not sought to complete an act of curtailed cruelty and kill me. He was rotten to the core with guilt but could not confess it to his waking mind without being ruined. So he sublimated it be recreating his initial crime, over and over. Not to ritualistically kill me, as I had thought, but to recreate the situation and try as best he can to explain without actually realizing what he was trying to explain.

I knelt beside the other victim, the young man, and assessed his condition. He was unconscious, his pulse thready and weak. He'd lost a great deal of blood. With some plastic surgery, plenty of supportive therapy, and time, he would recover. The only one of the Wraith's victims who had escaped.

Except for me. Except me. Except often I don't believe that I have, or ever will.


Excerpt from the journal of the Wraith:

If it chance your eye offend you
Pluck it out lad and be sound:
'Twill hurt, but there are salves to friend you
And many a balsam grows on ground.
If your hand or foot offend you,
Cut it off, lad, and be whole;
But play the man, stand up and end you,
When the sickness is your soul.

I know that whatever I do and however I try no one will ever call me anything besides monster. They will never know this naked and vulnerable human heart, I do believe this.


The police took the Wraith away; he went quietly. And that was the last I saw of him.

I slipped away quietly during the confusion of the arrest. There is a clinic where for the right price the doctors will ask you no questions. They tended to the empty socket where my bad eye used to sit. It had glared out with relentless accusation at the Wraith all these years, not from my countenance but from his own subconscious. It was the foundation upon which he'd built his entire existence and with it gone there was nothing left to him.

Less than two hours after his capture I was stitched up, coasting on painkillers and boarding a plane to my vacation home in Corfu, the most northerly of the Ionian Islands. There I live under a deeply encrypted false identity and so am out of reach of even the most dedicated newshounds. I have not watched television, read a newspaper or perused the internet, for I do not want to know his fate and think about the part I had in it.

One odd footnote. Since the loss of my eye my migraines have entirely ceased. The doctors tell me it is because my brain was confused by faulty signals sent sporadically by the damaged optic nerve, but I sometimes wonder if my frequent blinding headaches were psychogenic. Perhaps he released inner demons other than his own when we had our final confrontation. I can only speculate.


Excerpt from the journal of the Wraith:

I dream of Him, the Adversary. In my dreams, His blood flows into an ocean and I drown in it, rejoicing, for the all-seeing eye has at last closed.


The Wraith is what he became known as to a country eager to be distracted from a war with another faceless, incomprehensible enemy. The Wraith is how he will be remembered by history, alongside Jack the Ripper, the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Row, Zodiac, the Beltway Snipers, BTK, the Black Dahlia Avenger, Son of Sam, the Unabomber and other serial, spree and mass murderers.

But once I knew him by a different name. Once, I called him brother.

end

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